It Can Happen Here: Jack London Sinclair Lewis Philip Roth

ISBN-13: 9781479380206 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 130 str.

Claire Sprague

Opis

"It" is right wing revolution in America. That can't happen here. But the unimaginable does happen here in three daring counterfactual novels by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth. Not where or how it was supposed to happen. For the usual suspects, alien ideologues, are not the perpetrators. Instead, insiders, including two elected presidents, make the revolution. In "The Iron Heel," London imagines a terrorist proto-fascist Oligarchy that precipitates its overthrow of the elected government by throwing a bomb in the House of Representatives in 1913. "It" happens again in 1936 when President Buzz Windrip shows his true colors as a fascist in "It Can't Happen Here" and again in 1940 when President Charles Lindbergh, the celebrity aviator and America First sympathizer, defeats FDR and acts out his political sympathies in "The Plot Against America." Few readers of "The Call of the Wild" know that London was a committed Socialist whose works influenced George Orwell's "1984." Orwell praised "The Iron Heel"'s political prescience, but was less sure of its literary strengths. Nonetheless, the novel is a formidable work of imagination that has been called America's "1984." "It Can't Happen Here" was published just before FDR's second term when the country was in deep depression and Hitler's rise had barely begun. "The Plot Against America" centers on a Jewish family in a fascist America. It overlaps Lewis's novel in fictional time, taking the reader into the 1940s. All three novels underscore the historical strengths of native right wing movements. Fascism did not happen here, but these novels powerfully evoke its dark potential in American life.

Zawartość książki może nie spełniać oczekiwań – reklamacje nie obejmują treści, która mogła nie być redakcyjnie ani merytorycznie opracowana.